My Secret Life as an 11-Year-Old BBS System Operator

Thirty years ago, last week, November 25, 1992, my BBS went online for the first time. I was only 11 years old and I was working with my dad’s Tandy 1800HD laptop and a 2400 baud modem. The Cave BBS soon grew into a busy 24/7 system with over 1,000 users. After a seven year break between 1998 and 2005, I’m starting it up again. Here is the story of how it started and the challenges I encountered along the way.

Enter modem

In January 1992, my father brought home a gateway to a parallel world: a small black plexiglass box labeled “ZOOM”that plugged into a PC’s serial port. This modem allowed you to connect to other computers and exchange data over the switched telephone network.

While there were then commercial online services such as CompuServe and Prodigy, many hobbyists used their own miniature online services called bulletin board systems or BBS for short. The Internet existed, but was not yet widely known outside of academia.

While the Internet is a huge interconnected network of systems with billions of users, most BBSs were small hobbyist properties with a single telephone line and only one person could call and use it at a time. While BBS-to-BBS messaging networks were commonplace, each system still felt like its own island culture, with a tinny dictator (system operator, or “sysop”for short) who ruled over everyone who visited it.

Shortly after my father brought home the modem, he gave us a photocopied list of hundreds of BBS numbers from our 919 area code in North Carolina. At the time, the phone company charged a significant amount for long distance calls (which could also discreetly include parts of your area code), so we stuck with the BBS in our area. This made BBS mostly a local phenomenon in the US.

Modem in hand, my older brother – about five years older than me – first started calling BBS (we called it “BBSing”). He filled his Procomm Plus phone book with local favorite BBS’s like The Octopus’s Garden, The Body Shop and Chalkboard. Each system got its own flavor thanks to the system operator, who decorated it with ANSI graphics or special menus, and also acted as a host and moderator of discussions on the board.

I have a distinct memory of the first time I understood what a BBS was. One day, when I was looking over my brother’s shoulder, he showed me the file section of one of these BBSs, a list of available files that you could download to your local computer. Pages of free-to-play shareware games scrolled. My eyes widened and something clicked.

“Can you download games for free?”I remember thinking. I noticed one file labeled “RAMPAGE.ZIP”that was one hundred kilobytes in size – or “100 KB”as listed. Thinking of Rampage for the NES, which was one of my favorite games at the time, I asked my brother to download it. He refused because it would take more than five minutes to transfer through our 2400 bps modem. Downloading any file with a size of about one megabyte will take about an hour.

Online time was precious back then. Because most BBSs only had one phone line, you didn’t want to take the line too long or the sysop might kick you out. And that came with additional danger. Because we used our regular home phone line to connect, there was a very high chance that my mother would pick up the phone and try to get through, thereby disrupting the transfer process. But whatever the risk, the thrill of computer-assisted remote projection sank into me that day and never left.